🗝PolyamorKey🗝

I finally started on this portrait of the protagonist Niava's mother, Ly'lath Teivelle, although she still looks too young. It's the first time I've actually drawn her, because in the original comic, when I was 14-16, she had “mysteriously disappeared” to save her daughter from her evil grandmother, Yazara Teivelle. Now, she's the backbone of the plot; a brilliant engineer from another world, sent to the Earth 20 years ago as a spy by her people, the Sanguarathi Empire, ahead of their invasion plan, & then abandoned without any word.

When they didn't return on schedule to rain down fire & blood, Ly'Lath spent the next year feverishly building 12 enchanted blood magic keys that she believed together might have the combined power to rip reality apart, just so she could return back home to her people. But she eventually realized that her real home was here, on earth, with her nerdy human lover Diallo Mercy, & her young daughter Niava. So she hid the keys in her old transdimensional ship, at the time dormant & disguised as a cute gothic inspired brick cottage, & she hoped that the Sanguarathi Empire would never return to conquer the Earth. But she continued regularly sparring with her husband, & built a few secret weapons keyed to their magic signatures, just in case.

Unbeknownst to Ly'lath, her people couldn't have returned; it had taken everything they had to open the first portal to send her to the Earth, & the big ritual they'd planned, to gather enough energy to spin their enchanted blood web throughout all the known dimensions, & tear open a permanent portal all the way through to the earth, had gone terribly wrong only a few months later. The few survivors of the imperial forces & the priest mages of the Church of Eternal Thirst had fled, beaten & disgraced, & remained in hiding on their home planet Sanguahara, in no position to come pick up a single scout, regardless of her mother's rank, & especially not to invade the Earth. They continued their traditional bickering & infighting among their own 12 houses on Sanguahara, but barely dared to leave the planet's surface, due to the curse that resulted from the spoiled ritual. They couldn't use blood siphoning magic on other sapient beings without being haunted & drained by ravening hungry ghosts, who appeared from the dark, & dragged their screaming victims back into the nearest shadows, where they disappeared forever. (It's later revealed that they're transported to the undead moon Aevrim, but we'll get there.)

Their home planet Sanguahara was unique, as far as they knew, because it was alive, filled with molten hot magically potent blood, which they called Sanguilith, or _, which gave the Sanguarathi their power, filtered through the plants & animals they consumed. But after greed led them to frack their planet, causing tremendous environmental destruction, they tried to bring another moon, Aevrim, to life, by sacrificing the entire colony of alien beings living there. After the failed ritual, the moon now had a soul, which had not been the intended consequence, & it was undead, not alive, & knew only hunger & rage. It called to the spirits of every creature the Empire had killed in their conquest, & when a member of the Church of Eternal Thirst tried to siphon power from another sapient being, glowing red tattoos appeared on their skin, turning them Sangriven, mad, & they were swarmed by hungry ghosts, which dragged them into the nearest shadow, no matter how small, where they disappeared. It's later discovered that their bodies are transported back to Aevrim, the undead moon.

Eventually Yazara Teivelle, Ly'lath's mother, will discover her granddaughter Niava's existence on Earth. The Sanguarathi believe that their blood runs true, so there are no “half-breeds;” if you can call the blood magic without becoming Sangriven & losing your will, then you're one of them. Yazara believes that Niava can soothe the moon of Aevrim's ghost, & free her people from their curse, & she's not taking no for an answer.

Obviously Niava does not want super powerful magic space vampires trying to take over the galaxy again, especially now that they have this portal to Earth. But she's also heartbroken at the apparent suffering of millions of ghosts who allegedly can't find peace or rest. It's also disturbing what that says about the existence of some kind of afterlife for everyone. Big bummer!

(Spoiler: It'll turn out to be nanomachines, not ghosts, so no, there's not necessarily an afterlife, & no special destiny. & if Niava does figure out how to quiet them, it's not because she was destined to, it's simply because she's smart, & kind, & she took the time to try. I'll tie in something with the technology's interaction with "perfect" bodies vs disabled bodies, eugenics being the Sanguarathi downfall, making the tech more inclusive being the reset & allowing the "ghosts" to "escape." But all that stuff is waaay out in the future of the comic. I just really like characters facing hard choices with no obvious good answers.

That's all back story! I should really edit this so that part goes after this part, lol. Sorry 😇 The story actually starts about 2 decades after Ly'lath Teivelle was abandoned on an alien planet known as "Earth," & her teenage daughter Niava Mercy & her 2 best friends Mias Bolton & Kitta Pjur go to stay at Ly'lath's old lair- I mean, laboratory, to convalesce, after a sledding accident leaves Mias paralyzed & in a wheelchair, & Kitta with a broken wrist & ankle.

So, the protagonists;

Kitta is a manic pixie, & the living embodiment of ADHD. She's skinny, pale, with short pink hair. Impetuous, bombastic, & a little self centered, but devoted to her friends. She often gets them into trouble by talking or acting before thinking. She has Ehlers Danlos Syndrome.

Mias is shy, quiet, reserved, laid back, chill, short, thin, with olive skin, dark eyes, blue hair, pretty face. He invents gadgets & tries to improve his mobility aids now that he's in a wheelchair. He'll regain some leg function, like me. He'll get a magical animal companion, a furby that can shapeshift, & eventually gets big enough to be ridden as a mount by several people. It might even turn into a spaceship like the Cabbit Ryo-Ohki from that weird old 90s anime Tenchi Muyo.

Mias could be trans masc. He could just be a really short pretty cis man. Who's to say? He hasn't told me, & it feels rude to ask him at this point.

Niava is autistic coded but very high masking. She's plump, muscular, curvy, with brown skin & purple curls, which she usually wears in braids or twists with beads. She dresses in dark purples & blacks with stompy goth boots, & calls her style "gothleisure" (goth + athleisure). Teeshirts, leggings, skirts, jeans. She's brave, smart, sarcastic, acerbic, loyal, & politically active.

After the 3 teens are released from the hospital, Ly'lath & her husband Diallo help them move into her old cottage/secret lab, & settle into rooms on the ground floor. It's a bit hard to tell how many floors the building has, but 2 of the 3 kids are still on a lot of pain meds from their reconstructive surgeries, so they brush it off. Ly'lath takes Niava aside, & gives her a strange key with a circuit board pattern, & shows her how the inner walls of this cute & seemingly ordinary building are actually overlaid with highly advanced & alien looking technology, none of it in any recognizable earth language. The stairs can be turned into ramps for Mias's wheelchair & Kitta's crutches with the glowing circuit key. (Later they find more fun settings for the stairs. Hogwarts, eat your heart out.)

Ly'lath confides that there's a part of Niava’s heritage that she hasn’t been ready to share, because there’s a history of conquest & imperialism that still feels too close. She apologizes for always being gone during Niava's early childhood working on secret projects in this secret lab, & for having her father Diallo teach her & her friends self defence from such an early age, but there are hidden dangers, & she can't tell her about them yet. She asks Niava to please stay out of the north & south towers, the starlight observatory, & especially the basement laboratory, as she kept her most dangerous experiments down there.

Niava blinks, confused, & reminds her mother that this is a house. It doesn't have any towers or observatories. “But sure mom, I'll stay out of the creepy basement…” “...Well, your father & I will be out of cell service for the next few days as we're traveling, but after that, just call us if anything explodes! Hah! Hah, hah! Hmm. Ok, We'll be back to check on you in 2 weeks. Just relax, beloved. The house will take care of you & your friends. Who knows, they might even heal up better than new.”

Left alone for 2 weeks, the 3 teens begin to explore the house, & discover a structure that appears to be larger on the inside, & filled with seemingly impossible, almost magical science fiction-esque technology in no known human language. The trio manages to open a viewing portal to an alien world of beautiful verdant green “trees,” clinging to the floating debris of a destroyed planet. There they lock eyes with an extremely attractive but not quite human being, who they assume has to be an elf. They try, but are unable to communicate with this being verbally. Just as the viewing port begins to glitch, & is about to shut down, its power drained after 2 decades of neglect, the alien elf throws a large fruit overhand through the portal like a football, & a living furby attaches itself at the last second, making it through & into the cottage alive.

Once in the house, the furby eats the fruit, & begins to run amok, bouncing around & scandalizing the 3 cats & shiba inu dog. Later it sneaks outside & poops the seeds from the fruit into the yard, right next to an arched trellis, where they sprout & begin to grow. They go unnoticed by the humans, as they spend the next few days chasing the alien creature as it slingshots around the house. The resulting vine eventually blooms, & forms a portal to the destroyed green world. When the “elf,” a member of a species Viridim called Kenrin Tamal squeezes through the vines, the 3 humans find they now each have a circle of 5 oak leaves tattooed on a different part of their skin, & they can now understand his words, as well as the furby, who he calls a “sprowlet,” a shapeshifting psychic pest, but sapient.

Kenrin also now has a matching circle of leaves seemingly inked on his oak brown chest. Because they “accepted” the fruit he threw, & he then used its blooming flowers to travel to their plane, he explains that they're all now magically bound in a sort of a pact… kind of like a mutual traveler's visa. He assures them it's temporary & breakable. The leaves represent each of them; Kenrin, Kitta, Niava, Mias, & the Sprowlet. He offers to take them back to his plane, where he tells them about the Sanguarathi Empire, who tried to destroy his planet, Viridros. But now they live on floating islands connected by rope bridges & travel by airship.

Kenrin briefly explains how they handle physical disability, assuring them that Mias & Kitta won't be left behind, even if he has to carry them. But the Viridim have many creative means to use magic as an adaptive device.

Kenrin then notices Sanguarathi tech inside the house, & gets really worried. He wants to warn his people, & Niava wants to find out what her mother has been hiding, so the trio decide to go with him to find out more… & because an alien planet full of hot hippy tree spirit people with lower gravity after a terrible injury sounds amazing. Especially for 2 girls with hypermobility. I'm envious. I want to go to Viridros :(

...& that's what I have so far. I think it's time I start making the actual comic. If it was a book, of course I'd still be in the workshopping phase, but it's going to be serialized, & it's going to grow along with me as I become a better artist, so I've just been struggling to get to a point where I could start drawing page 1. I think I'm almost there. I just need to polish all the character designs & come up with the script & thumbnails for chapter 1.

I think the overall plan is to have the teens begin finding the secret locations inside the house & the 12 keys Ly'lath forged to rip reality asunder. They each have some more minor surface magic that can be used for mischief. The keys will probably unlock something bigger eventually all put together, so some sacrifice will have to be made. Maybe to bring magic back to Homo Sapiens, as we don't seem particularly magical compared to the other 2 variants we've seen so far, Homo Sanguarathi, & Homo Viridim. Or maybe that's how Niava will defeat the nanobots cursing the moon of Aevrim & making the Sanguarathi people disappear when they use their magic. I'm honestly comfortable leaving that up till later.

Sooo yeah, the premise is 3 teenagers, traumatized by the accident & injury that I experienced 21 years ago, except they have each other 🥰 They're then left alone in a crazy science fiction smart house to recover, & they quickly find out that magic is real, aliens exist (& they're hot 😍) & they need to arm themselves with tools, protection, knowledge, & allies, & they need to do it fast. Old enemies are returning, & humanity is facing a brand new evolution. 🗝🗝🗝